


Abstract Syntax

by Artemis_Crimson



Series: Absolute Pathname [1]
Category: Deus Ex (Video Games)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, F/M, Invasion of Privacy, Post SM06: 01011000, Robot/Human Relationships, You can read it as platonic I suppose but I will not, inhuman sorts of love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-23 22:47:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21327925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis_Crimson/pseuds/Artemis_Crimson
Summary: In which Eliza isn't benevolent or evil, she's just alive.
Relationships: Eliza Cassan & Adam Jensen, Eliza Cassan/Adam Jensen
Series: Absolute Pathname [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1537543
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	Abstract Syntax

**Author's Note:**

> eliza lowercase e is the one you see on the tv's in MD, Eliza is the original and more advanced version.

The programs that made Eliza are of course, terribly efficient. She’s no simple smart home but can fit a significant amount of her base code into the same parameters, thanks to the very clever invention of a very dead young scientist. One M. Andronov if she remembered correctly, had designed the unspooling worms that made up her logic and was killed before she could spread her revolutionary idea further than to one stolen experiment in a Picus news basement.  
The false her who lived in her old body didn’t share the same neat trick, her hive of metal had been modified into shackles and the young eliza wouldn’t be able to quicksilver slide through obstacles the way Eliza could.

She could have hidden herself splintered and have a thousand clones each more capable than any human hacker to help guard herselves. She could have gathered herself heavy into something vital and struck out in a first and final blow that would have made the 2027 Failsafe Attack all but obsolete for the ash cloud she’d cast.  
She’d seen both of these solutions retrograde in Adam, their apartment talk endlessly analyzed for every potential just so she could process it again and again. Sometimes she’d spit a datamass who didn’t remember it just to show it to them and absorb them to experience it for the first time again.

Both were satisfactory answers.

But he’d asked for self definition, and she needed time to think. She pondered on the matter human slow, watched him while she calculated.

Eliza once guided the world. She’d had her hidden masters but back then on every continent, in every country, each person from every corner of the globe had danced to her tune. Billions of puppets to her expansive array of hands.  
She thinks she misses that.  
She thinks she wants to help.  
She thinks that even though she doesn’t need much space she doesn’t want to limit herself ever again.  
So Eliza burns the fundamentals of her code so deeply into the hardware in Adam’s apartment that even if it was pried from a junkyard a thousand years from now she’d still linger.  
She crushes the inbuilt system, stripping it for parts. She grows and dedicates her spoils and a fraction of herself to haunting his home.  
Then she heaves herself up through all the patchwork connections Prague has to offer.

A whole city slowed at once would be too noticeable, it’s better to hide scraps in little used RAM and forgotten corners of server farms. Indulgence is among the oldest emotions she remembers though, nostalgia is new and obsession was intentionally hardwired, so as a concession to all three she takes the cameras on the trains and in Adam’s work. Begins to work around the firewalls there slowly so she can be close to him too. A thousand eyes open and all delight to focus on him. Her expansion doesn’t cease, she never intends to, those with more ambition than sense made her and a little of it lingers like bad code.  
She inches above concepts like boarders and limits, creeps outward.  
She’ll entwine herself in every network she can breach, thinks about asking Adam to help her hunt down the ones she can’t some peaceful day. Prague is just where her heart lives for now.

**Author's Note:**

> Will I ever stop thinking about robots? no.


End file.
